[ David
Jones's ] work reveals a complex and
acute cultural awareness, both of
the challenges of Imperialism and
“technocracy” in the mid-twentieth
century and of his own personal
roots in artistic and literary
modernism, Celtic culture and
Catholic Christianity. What we meet
in reading a text or viewing a work
by David Jones is an artist in the
process of making, and aware of the
dynamic character of a work of art.

We are not so
much deciphering or admiring a
finished product as we are
discovering traces of the activity
of making, in this artist’s
particular experience, an activity
that he associates with a sacred
dimension of human life.

DAVID JONES returns!FlashPøint #13,
Spring 2010, showcased
the art of Welsh poet and painter David Jones, as well as scholarly reflections on his
poetry. Two years later the David Jones Society held a new conference on Jones at
Washington Adventist University in Takoma Park, Maryland. This issue of
FlashPøint features papers presented at that
conference.

David Jones has further
company in this issue of FlashPoint. One wonders what painter Jones
would think of Tim
Wengertsman’s work, but at the very least it would likely leave him arrested, not
to say mesmerized.

Catchwords & banalities storm through & about the
protagonist in John Ryskamp's "The Curtain Rises on the Revolution," pummeling
outward into single-sentence vignettes. Does he swat them off or is he batting them
forward? From the play:
"Ryskamp likes to guide his audience two fingers in the nostrils back to the stage."
and "Are we dreaming Ryskamp or is he dreaming us?"

Heady company for Master
Jones!

Even headier, Robert Coover takes (off) on a boyhood contemporary of Jones — Mark Twain — as he imagines what Twain did not — Huck Finn's (and Tom Sawyer's) later adventures after "lightin' out for the Territory." JR Foley booknotes Coover's new Huck Out West … as well as a brand-new selection of Coover’s short fictions, circa 1962-2016, entitled Going for a Beer. These shorties are never less than either funny or scary … or both at once.

More heady company comes in
the form of two episodes, "Bonus Army" and "Diabasis," from Jon
Woodson’s new novel, "Summer Games," wherein four Black grad students drive
cross-country from Washington, D.C., and the Bonus Army camp on Anacostia Flats,
to the 1932 Olympic Summer Games in Los Angeles. Let it not be said that the tales
of Woodson are ever exercises in historical naturalism.

In "The Swallow" Joan McCracken
takes us further into the passion and exuberant vision of Miriam amid lovers past and
future. Then one of the lovers remembers Miriam in Ode to a Nightingale.

But this seems game-playing in
the face of what Pier Paolo Pasolini attempted in his never-produced screenplay
St. Paul, which retold the early days of Christianity – transplanted to
Nazi-dominated France – before, as Pasolini shows it, Satan and St. Luke turned it
into a Church. Luciana Bohne in recounting the scenario asks: is it "a
prophecy of our times?"

And Ictus bites again! Canus Ictus, fool and gadfly exiled by Rome, wanders his isle of bones
and skulls reminiscing of orgies and massacres past, invoking ghostly Spartacus,
shipwrecks, battles with Spartoi, and the last time he and Loquatia wasted no time.

With Peter Dale Scott's Walking on Darkness set to appear later this year, FlashPoint is proud to present
Six Poems from this new collection.

Some might wonder why we're juxtaposing works by the avowedly religious David
Jones with a piece about the Marxist filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini's unfinished film
'St. Paul', the art work of the Punk woodcut artist Tim Wengertsman, and the work of
the avowedly irreligious poet Carlo Parcelli.

But the juxtapositions are connected by a moral & aesthetic thread. David Jones shied
away from the blasphemous curses of his Cockney WWI trench comrades, but he
described their inherent power as 'almost liturgical'. And Pasolini noted that "Every
blasphemy is a sacred word."

"For now the artist becomes, willy-nilly, a sort of Boethius, who has been nicknamed
"the Bridge", because he carried forward into an altogether metamorphosed world
certain of the fading oracles which had sustained antiquity."

This comports with Pasolini's views. For Pasolini, as critic Stefania Benini has noted,
"The sacred embodies the nemesis of modernity". Benini summarizes Pasolini's views
from his notable 1970 interview with Jean Duflot:

"He looks back nostagically to the mythical relationship of ancient civilizations with
nature and the earth from the extreme margins of the "universo orrendo" ('horrendous
universe') perceived, from a Marxist perspective, as the dominion of bourgeois
homogenization and consumerism."

And Jones continues with what could apply to Tim Wengertsman's desire to document
the otherwise marginilazed Punk subculture of himself and his friends in Hartford, CT:

"My view is that all artists [...] are in fact "showers forth" of things which tend to be
impoverished, or misconceived, or altogether lost or wilfully set aside in the
preoccupations of our present intense technological phase, but which, none the less,
belong to man."

In Wengertsman's work we see a powerful yearning for comraderie and meaning. The
meaning often comes through the physical/spiritual use and misuse of drugs &
alcohol, but the desire for what's holy to him & his companions is annointed in his
work by the use of halos & other religious iconography. Wengertsman is satirical but
calls justifiably for empathy, asking us to feel the pathos of the lives of his subjects
along with the humor.

There's a strong desire for social justice in our four artists - a desire for a way to
expose the brutality imposed by humankind on one another.

As one critic put it, Pasolini often used "religious/mythic imagery to ground a political
critique".

David Jones suffered immeasurably from the devastation of World War I. He also
found the stories of the Roman Imperium apt for depicting the hegemony of our time.

In the David Jones painting "Martyrdom" above, St. Ignatius, Bishop of Antioch, is attacked by
lions as punishment for his refusal to renounce his faith. He's frightened, and his
vestments prove an insubstantial armor against the lions' attack. Eric Gill said of Jones
that:

'We should miss the quality of his work if we did not see that it is a combination of
two enthusiasms, that of the man who is enamoured of the spiritual world and at the
same time as much enamoured of the material body in which he must clothe his
vision.'

The lions depict the instinctive, brutal force of nature but also the ferocious desire for
power on the part of the men who placed the Saint there, men such as those who gave
us World War I.

Carlo Parcelli uses the Roman Imperium in his poetic monologues as metaphor for our
current Western Imperialist age. But his characters don't look to the spiritual. Instead
they predict a hunger for recourse with the same ferocity that matches that of the lion.
As one of his characters says, "The meek will stand a bear up in a pen if it's
meat."